90th Academy Awards announced in LA

Barry Jenkins, director of the winning Best Picture 'Moonlight' at the 2017 Academy Awards with his 'Oscar' statue
REUTERS/Danny Moloshok

The nominations for the 90th Oscars were announced Tuesday, with The Shape of Water, Dunkirk and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri leading the pack.The award ceremony in Los Angeles, California, will take place on 4 March 2018.

Both movies, The Shape of Water and Dunkirk have been nominated for Best Picture and Best Director among several other categories.

The nominees and nominated films are chosen by thousands of people in the film industry.

Jordan Peele's Get Out, and Greta Gerwig's Lady Bird are competing in the same two categories as is Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread.

Five directors have been nominated in this category, but another four directors have had their films placed in the best picture award category. Those films include Luca Guadagnino's Call me by your Name, Joe Wright's Darkest Hour, Stephen Spielberg's The Post and Martin McDonaugh's 3 Billboards Outside Ebbing Missouri.

Vying for the Best foreign language film Oscar are A Fantastic Woman, a Chilean film directed by Sebastián Leli , Loveless from Russian director Andrei Zvyagintsev, Hungarian Ildikó Enyedi's On Body and Soul and Swedish director Ruben Östlund's 2017 Cannes Golden Palm winning satire, The Square.

Faces Places (Visages Villages), from France, is a documentary filmed in different locations around France by filmmaker Agnès Varda and photographer-mural artist JR which did well in France and abroad. It has been nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar award.

Tiffany Haddish and Andy Serkis announced this year's US Academy Award contenders live from the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Los Angeles, California.

Haddish got tongue-twisted when she had to pronounce Daniel Kaluuya's name, the lead actor in the film, Get Out. He is one of five including 8-time nominee and 2-time winner, Denzel Washington, for Roman J. Israel, Esq., along with Gary Oldman for his role as Winston Churchill in Darkest Hour, Timothée Chalamet in Call Me by Your Name, and Daniel Day-Lewis in Phantom Thread.

Serkis was more composed when announcing the best actress contenders: Sally Hawkins for The Shape of Water, Frances McDormand in Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, Margot Robbie in I, Tonya, Saoirse Ronan for Lady Bird
and Meryl Streep, The Post.

Meryl Streep remains the most-nominated actress of all time. In 2018 she's a potential winner for her role in Spielberg's The Post. It is her 21st nomination. She has won three Oscars, for Kramer vs Kramer, Sophie's Choice films she starred in in the 1980s, and more recently for The Iron Lady.